Not Alone

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Not Alone Page 31

by Falconer, Craig A.


  Jack Neal hesitated. He was safely back in his car and headed to the airport, but explaining where he’d been without landing Emma in felony-level trouble wouldn’t be easy.

  “Jack? Where are you?”

  “Don’t blame me that there’s no cell reception in Hickville, Colorado,” Jack eventually said, picking his path with a reluctant white lie. “I didn’t send myself here.”

  “So what the hell happened?”

  “I couldn’t get to them,” Jack said. “There were roadblocks at the end of every street, and I couldn’t exactly get out of the car to negotiate. I was about as welcome in Birchwood as a fart in a spacesuit.”

  “So you completely failed with both plans,” Slater lamented. “With every objective.”

  “That’s hardly fair. Walker wasn’t there, and I couldn’t get near McCarthy’s place.”

  “What about the media area?”

  “What about it?” Jack said. “There were a thousand cameras. Why would I have gone there?”

  “She was there, you idiot! McCarthy was there. If you couldn’t talk to them, you were supposed to stop them.”

  “Valerie, I tried. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s my fault for sending a boy to do a man’s job.”

  “I told you to distance yourself from Walker this morning,” Jack said firmly, ignoring Slater’s jab. His age — 38 — was certainly young for a man of his unconventional political influence, and cheap fodder for lazy satirists around the country. By this point, it was water off a duck’s back. “I told you she wouldn’t have made a big deal of the 7pm event if it wasn’t something game-changing.”

  President Slater thought in silence for several seconds. Jack had been proven right, whether she would concede it or not. But Jack sometimes failed to understand the responsibility on her shoulders. Publicly distancing herself from a political heavyweight like Richard Walker, while an easy thing for Jack to suggest, was too drastic and too risky a step to take on a hunch. Aside from the personal ramifications, she also had to worry about things way above Jack’s pay grade, like the effects that the slightest presidential suggestion that aliens might be real — aliens! — would have on the stock market, not to mention public order or the world’s myriad religious conflicts.

  But now, of course, Slater no longer had any choice. Walker’s brand had become fatally toxic, and the only sensible thing for the President to do was make a short statement which acknowledged the magnitude of Dan McCarthy’s revelations and affirmed her support for lawful attempts to get to the bottom of them.

  “Do you have a flight tonight?” Slater eventually said, abandoning the squabble with Jack that was positively petty compared to the volcano of problems erupting all around them. No one in the world could do damage limitation like Jack Neal, and his skills were needed now more than ever.

  “It’s going to be tight,” Jack said, “but I should make it.” He held his phone to his shoulder and spoke to the driver: “Seriously, you need to step on it.”

  President Slater drummed her fingers on her desk as the ACN feed on her computer screen replayed the highlights from Dan’s revealing of the Kloster letter. “Let me know,” she said. “I’ll be at my desk all night.”

  “Okay. And Valerie, don’t beat yourself up over this. You’re not the only one he kept this from.”

  Slater put the phone down on her desk, sat back, closed her eyes, and shook her head.

  Richard fucking Walker.

  THURSDAY

  D minus 35

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  Dan, having slept on the couch to allow Emma a well-earned night’s rest in his bed, yawned awake shortly after 8am. He could hear Clark snoring from halfway across the house.

  The previous night had been a strange one, with Emma and Clark glued to the TV as reactions to the letter poured in while Dan lay with his eyes closed on his bed, unable to sleep for hours despite being physically and mentally exhausted by a week of non-stop thinking about nothing but the leak. He eventually gave up and joined them in the living room, where he ultimately faded off to sleep around 4am.

  With a few hours of sleep behind him, Dan now felt like he had done all he possibly could to give the truth a fighting chance, and that it was now over to everyone else to take it from here.

  The crushing pressure of keeping quiet about the letter no longer weighed on his mind, allowing room for broader thoughts about the train he had set in motion. Government recognition of intelligent alien life really would change everything, and capital-D Disclosure was now closer than ever before. The complication of Jack Neal and President Slater apparently being as in the dark as everyone else didn’t trouble or surprise Dan too much; his mind had always been open to the possibility of a small, private group being the keepers of the secret. That such a group might contain only one living member was a slightly harder possibility to swallow, but Dan knew better than to underestimate Richard Walker.

  Having been concentrating so hard on exposing the lie, Dan hadn’t had much time to consider the full implications of the truth. After waking up, he lay on the couch for a while thinking about the likely political fallout from capital-D Disclosure. His mind was still too wrapped up in all of this to give much thought to what the aliens themselves might be like and what kind of benefits their return might bring.

  Before long, Dan tiptoed to the kitchen and fetched himself an ice-cold bottle of Houghton’s Home Fresh Lemonade. He smiled as it hit his lips; he would forever associate the drink’s earthy taste with the last week, and Emma in particular.

  Lemonade in hand, Dan returned to the couch and turned on the TV. He lowered the volume from its default roar as quickly as possibly; neither Emma nor Clark had slept properly for days, and the last thing Dan wanted to do was disturb them.

  The TV was tuned to ACN. Maria Janzyck stood in her usual position at the drive-in, which looked to be a lot busier than normal but nowhere near the level of the previous night’s madness. She was talking live, referring to relatively minor developments that Dan had apparently slept through.

  Maria name-checked the same Yale-based handwriting expert who had drawn Richard Walker’s ire after the initial leak. The man then appeared in a brief interview segment which looked like it had been pre-recorded on his home computer’s webcam. Dan didn’t give too much weight to the man’s words — the letter was real, whatever this guy said — but listened nonetheless as he stated his personal opinion that the letter was “either the work of Hans Kloster or an extraordinarily sophisticated forgery.”

  Dan learned that a similarly calligraphic but topically mundane letter penned by Hans Kloster to an uncle in Germany shortly after his move to the United States had been handed to a German news station by a museum owner in Dusseldorf, enabling a comparative analysis. The expert homed in on irregularities in the way that Kloster’s lower-case “r” joined whichever letter followed; such irregularities, which he described as “highly idiosyncratic”, were common to both letters.

  When Maria asked if he would stake his reputation on this letter being Kloster’s, as he had on the initial handwritten documents being Walker’s, the expert chose his words carefully: “Well, if I didn’t know what these words meant, I would have no hesitation in saying yes. I’ve stated my professional opinion on the origin of this writing, but that’s as far as I’ll go. Interpreting or evaluating the content of this letter is way above my pay grade.”

  Maria, who Dan had liked from the start, then mentioned in passing a few more names he was familiar with, including Mark Shaw, the history professor from Dan’s appearance on Focus 20/20. Though Shaw hadn’t directly spoken to ACN, he had also uploaded a recording of his post-letter thoughts. Maria introduced a snippet of the video, which soon filled the screen.

  Shaw had been relatively open-minded about Dan’s claims on Sunday evening, and the letter seemed to have finally convinced him. He isolated individual facts from the letter which he said Dan couldn’
t possibly have known, particularly those related to Mattheus Scholl, Hans Kloster’s cartographer accomplice.

  “Scholl’s name is nowhere,” Shaw said. “Nowhere. The first time I saw that name was last night and the second time was an hour ago, when the museum letter surfaced. Writing from Texas, Hans asked his uncle to forward some money to Scholl’s surviving family. Now, from what I’ve read since last night, Mattheus Scholl appears to have been, with respect, a mediocre cartographer with no clear links to the party hierarchy. Knowledge of his relationship with the Kloster family is the kind of esoteric fact I said the initial documents were lacking. I see no way in which Dan McCarthy could have known anything about it, much less the exact date Scholl was forcibly recruited, which has already been verified by a relative.”

  Shaw then corroborated the leaders, dates and paths of the Nazi expeditions mentioned in the letter. Though admitting that these facts were more readily accessible, he stressed that they had never before been put into such a compelling context. Shaw’s eyes were bright and his words quick; as a historian, the developments excited him.

  He finished by discussing the translation of the letter itself, calling Dan’s digital effort “a surprisingly good attempt” but suggesting that everyone should begin quoting from and analysing one of the many superior professional translations that had already been made available. Despite some variation across these translations, the word “Messengers” remained capitalised in common usage following Dan’s initial decision to treat it as a proper noun.

  After Shaw’s video ended, Maria shifted gears to cover grander matters of international politics.

  The posturing had begun overnight when the Norwegian government, less internationally disliked than those of the US and UK, made a measured but firm declaration of interest in future developments relating to the Kerguelen sphere.

  “While all of humanity has an interest in these developments,” their statement read, “as administrators of the dependencies where two of the four spheres are said to have been discovered, we feel that Norway has a legitimate right to a prominent role in the coming discussions.”

  Though William Godfrey had not yet issued an official response to the letter’s publication, his new Deputy PM John Cole appeared extensively on British television throughout the morning. Cole blasted the Norwegians for “arguing semantics over their claim to the wartime plunder of a fearsome enemy against whom Great Britain stood alone.” He also refused to refer to Bouvet Island by its “Norwegian name” and instead urged the press to call it Liverpool Island, as christened by the Briton who made the first landing in 1825; a full 102 years before the Norwegians showed up. Within minutes of Cole’s comment it was pointed out to him that Bouvet Island was in fact named after the Frenchman who discovered it in 1739. Cole shrugged this off as an irrelevant detail.

  Kerguelen was indisputably French while Namtso, in Tibet, fell under Chinese influence. The world continued to wait patiently for Beijing to issue any kind of response to the IDA leak.

  Like Bouvet Island, the Antarctic location of the first discovered sphere was also a Norwegian dependency, this one known as Queen Maud Land. Queen Maud Land had been claimed by Nazi Germany as New Swabia immediately prior to the sphere’s discovery, but the current German government understandably had no desire to draw any attention to that point.

  When asked whether attempts to recover the Kerguelen sphere should proceed only with Argentina’s blessing, John Cole scoffed at the notion and responded with a typically provocative question of his own: “If you want to talk about respecting international boundaries in the South Atlantic, why don’t you ask the Falkland islanders if the Argentines’ word can be trusted?”

  Dan couldn’t understand why Godfrey had allowed Cole to make the first comments. Emma had explained to him that Cole was a political liability, for one thing, and she had also fully expected a crowing and gloating Godfrey to greet the press at the earliest opportunity.

  He hadn’t, and Dan wondered why.

  Maria handed back over to the studio with her usual sign-off: “From Birchwood, Colorado, I’m Maria Janzyck.”

  When ACN cut to commercials, Dan switched over to Blitz News to see what perceived holes in the story they were desperately clinging to now. The topic they were discussing when Dan first switched over was the overnight deluge of photoshopped spheres which had flooded the internet.

  The Blitz News team were slightly less derisive than Dan expected. All but one of the images they focused on set Dan’s bullshit detector off at the first glance; Dan was no computer whizz, but even he could have thrown together some more convincing fakes in a few hours at most.

  The best fake was an aged photograph showing two proud fishermen standing next to a pockmarked sphere, one posing at each side like they would have done for any other impressive catch. The sphere was waist-high.

  Despite the size discrepancy — Kloster described the spheres as knee-high — this image more than any other had apparently captured the media’s attention overnight. Dan appreciated the quality of the photoshop job but wasn’t surprised when Blitz displayed the recently uncovered original photograph of the two men posing beside a large stingray.

  Dan kept watching Blitz News even after four minutes had passed and ACN had returned from commercials. Something about Blitz was just so slick and easy to watch; there was, after all, a reason they were number one.

  As the dramatic music played before the next bulletin, Dan wondered what headline they would lead with. Maria’s ACN coverage had touched on several headline-worthy developments, and the story of the letter itself — only thirteen hours old — would still be breaking news for some viewers.

  Two words and a question mark, the headline could hardly have been simpler:

  “Smoking Gun?”

  Dan shifted in his seat. Could Blitz be switching sides?

  His hope proved short-lived as the studio lights went up, revealing the anchor to be none other than Sarah Curtis, the most experienced member of the Blitz News team and a woman who had personally belittled Billy Kendrick on Friday before expressing great amusement at Emma’s altercation with Marco Magnifico on Tuesday.

  For the next two minutes, however, Sarah Curtis delivered an open-minded rundown which wouldn’t have been out of place on ACN. Dan watched and listened in quiet amazement as she used phrases that didn’t fit in the slightest with the previous Blitz stance — phrases like “Dan McCarthy last night continued his push for government transparency” and “we at Blitz News look forward to using our platform in support of The Now Movement’s commendable goals.”

  Curtis and Blitz didn’t attempt to rewrite history so much as they opted to completely ignore it. While they didn’t pretend to have supported Dan from the beginning, there was equally no mention of the hit-piece written about him on Saturday morning; no mention of the schoolwork published to embarrass him on Monday; no mention of the spy drone; no mention of the illegal bugging that had since been publicly exposed.

  This brazen flip-flop brought to Dan’s mind a point that Billy Kendrick often made. Billy said that the people and organisations who most vocally opposed a particular cause would inevitably switch sides when their previous position became untenable, usually turning into the most vocal proponents of the same cause they had argued against.

  “With the tipping point comes the flipping point,” as Billy put it, and Dan had just seen Blitz News flip before his very eyes.

  Dan would have appreciated an apology for the harassment that Blitz Media’s TV and newspaper wings had inflicted on him over the last five or six days, but he knew it was foolish to expect so much from such a shameless corporation. On balance, he was just glad that their relentless fire had finally ceased. Having never really wanted a war with Blitz in the first place, Dan was happy to take allies wherever he found them.

  Just as Sarah Curtis began to touch on an unrelated story — something about a tsunami approaching Thailand — she looked down and swiped on an unseen tabl
et computer on her desk.

  “Okay, folks,” she said, watching something on the tablet’s screen, “we’re going to cut to some incoming footage of… uh, what appears to be… yes, an escalation of some kind at this morning’s demonstration outside the IDA building in Colorado Springs.”

  Footage of the demonstration, which was really too weak a word, filled Dan’s TV. The turnout was literally hundreds of times greater than the last protest Dan had seen there on Monday morning. The mass of demonstrators, many wearing homemade Now Now Now T-shirts, had suddenly swarmed an incoming vehicle.

  As the camera zoomed in on the car’s window, Dan jumped off the couch and ran towards the bedrooms. He briefly stalled at the adjacent doors — his and Clark’s — then made his decision over who to wake first.

  “Emma,” he said, knocking frantically.

  She groaned in reply. “Hmmm?”

  “He showed up for work,” Dan said. He heard a thud as Emma’s feet hit the floor.

  Still in last night’s clothes, Emma opened the door, rubbed her eyes in protest at the living room’s natural light, and stumbled over to the TV.

  Clark opened his own bedroom door seconds later, evidently roused by Dan’s knocking. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  Dan beckoned Clark with his hand and answered on his way back to the couch: “Walker’s at the IDA.”

  D minus 34

  IDA Headquarters

  Colorado Springs, Colorado

  Of the countless news networks whose vans and satellite trucks had congregated at the IDA building to cover The Now Movement’s largest demonstration yet, none had dared to dream of what happened next.

  In the middle of a hostile and under-policed mass of protestors, Richard Walker calmly stepped out of his car. His building’s security guards, including Raúl, quickly rushed over to create a barrier. Richard walked slowly towards the main entrance, limping only slightly, and with something like a grin on his face.

 

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